The flow of work in an enterprise system is largely influenced by the available methods of access and presentation of enterprise data to the user. The limit on the number of combinations of visualization and access methods of the various types of enterprise data and events can cause inefficiencies in the ability of persons to do their work within an enterprise system. Existing software applications, for example, MICROSOFT OFFICE products, have features that allow users to navigate in the software, and to view and select actions from menus, in order to do their work on a computer.
Different visualization approaches have been used, including a menu, a picture representation of a file (e.g., an icon), etc. These metaphors allow for the presentation of certain data, but have suffered limited usability in terms of providing information regarding particular stages or phases of a process. Other, more complex visualization metaphors, including fish eye views, hyperbolic relatedness browsers, tree diagrams, etc., have been developed to show further complex levels of detail and relationship among data.
However, the visualizations currently available for enterprise applications lack the ability to interact in significant ways with the presented data.